Before returning to Vietnam to visit, I wanted to understand more about where in the north we had actually been in combat. Patti and I traveled to the US National Archives site in College Park, Maryland, outside Washington, D. C.
I made advance arrangements to have the USS Newport News deck logs for 1967 and 1968 available for us. We registered as researchers and spent most of the day scanning copies of log pages.

These are selected deck log pages from the first Vietnam tour in 1967 and 1968. They include the first day she ever fired her guns in anger, the POW capture, and the days we received counter battery.
(Also included is New Year's Day when Ensign Howlett made his deck log entry in verse.)